Understanding Core Shame

Written by Lydia Ramharack, M.S.

Shame is often thought of as an emotion that guides our moral compass and informs how we repair and maintain relationships. In general, shame can help us make amends when we take actions that we regret and open a pathway for us to not repeat those same mistakes. It’s important to note here that shame is attached to our behaviors.

Core shame, however, is attached to our fundamental understanding of ourselves. These are the messages that we’ve internalized about ourselves that result in us feeling like we are not enough. Core shame leads to us being disconnected from ourselves and others due to the internalization of being unworthy of love, belonging, and acceptance.

Core shame develops when there are continued ruptures in trust and safety in interpersonal relationships. We may start to be victim to these repeated ruptures in our interpersonal relationships in childhood due to early attachment experiences. Some examples of early childhood ruptures include: not getting your physical and/or emotional needs met by your parents, experiencing parentification, being bullied, and conflict with your siblings. However, they also continue as we move through adolescence and adulthood and create interpersonal relationships with family, friends, co-workers, and even therapists. Some examples of ruptures later in life include: infidelity, a breakdown of communication, feeling like your trust was betrayed, financial irresponsibility in a relationship, and an unsafe work environment.

As core shame is directly connected to feeling unworthy of love and belonging in interpersonal relationships, we may try to compensate for what we feel is lacking in ourselves in order to attempt to feel worthy to others. This can result in perfectionism–setting the bar for ourselves to be impossibly high to offset our belief that we are deeply flawed. Unfortunately, as perfectionism is unachievable, we continue to understand ourselves within a lens of failure and inadequacy. This continued sense of unworthiness can lead to us engaging in self-punishing behaviors such as: isolation, negative self-talk, avoidance of help, overworking to the point of burnout, and substance abuse.

With this understanding of how core shame develops and what behaviors we may engage with as a result of core shame, we can start to deconstruct our shame narratives and start to reconstruct our relationship with ourselves from a more compassionate framework through understanding our shame triggers, identifying external factors that lead to experiences of shame, inviting empathy from and giving empathy to others, and being open about our experiences with shame.